In the wake of the banking crisis, Bob Diamond said the time for “remorse and apology” was over – and the former Barclays chief has certainly enjoyed an unapologetically lavish lifestyle.

In a good year, the outgoing chief executive – who resigned today- could be paid up to £20million – about 1,000 times more than a teller in a high street Barclays.

And while the nation struggled to make ends meet, the fat cat banker used his £100million personal fortune to fund a jet set lifestyle.

Unsurprising then that Lord Mandelson once described him as the “unacceptable face of banking”.

Just last week, a photo appeared on Twitter showing the shamed banking boss posing with Chelsea captain John Terry and the FA Cup.

The snap – posted by his daughter – gave an insight into Mr Diamond’s extraordinary lifestyle as David Cameron tried to fend off calls for a full-scale public inquiry into the banking scandal.

Chelsea fan Diamond strolled into the dressing room after the Blues beat Liverpool at Wembley in May - all smiles just weeks before Barclays was fined £290million for trying to fix the rate at which banks lend to each other.

But splashing his cash following his beloved football team is just one of many luxuries enjoyed by the 60-year-old.

When he first moved to London, Mr Diamond paid cash for a £2million house in Chelsea.

In the summer of 2005, he splashed out on a new family home in London’s exclusive Wycombe Square, near music mogul Simon Cowell, at a cost of £10.5million.

Mr Diamond also regularly uses NetJets, a company that allows part-ownership of private jets for the fabulously wealthy to fly around the world.

It costs about £250,000 for 50 hours of flying time, meaning a trip between London and New York would cost £40,000.

An ardent sports fan, he supports the Boston Red Sox and Premier League side Chelsea, to whom he has presented the league trophy on three occasions.

He is also a member of the exclusive Queenwood Golf Club in Surrey, where the exclusive fairways are a favourite of investment bankers.

Behind his multimillionaire exterior, Mr Diamond came from quite humble roots on the east coast of America.

Now a UK citizen, he grew up in Massachusetts as one of nine children to schoolteacher parents Anne and Robert Edward Senior – both second-generation Irish immigrants.

A keen academic, he studied economics at Colby College in Maine and later took an MBA at the University of Connecticut’s Business School.

After leaving college, Diamond briefly became a lecturer in economics before moving onto a much more lucrative career with investment bank Morgan Stanley International.

He later held a senior leadership role at Credit Suisse First Boston – where he was rumoured to have walked out after branding his $10million bonus as paltry – before joining Barclays in 1996.

Mr Diamond quickly shot up the ranks to become the bank’s president and chief executive of its investment division Barclays Capital.

It is largely down to Mr Diamond's Barclays Capital division that the UK bank avoided state assistance during the credit crunch, although market turmoil has dented his former division's profits in recent months.

Mr Diamond, who was appointed chief executive on January 1 last year, picked up a salary of £11.3 million and was reportedly in line to receive £11 million in payouts this year before waiving his annual bonus in the wake of the rate-rigging scandal.

Within days of starting the top job at Barclays, and having passed up his bonus handout in 2009 and 2010, he angered some MPs last year by saying the time for "remorse and apology" needed to be over as banks looked to support Britain's recovery.

Mr Diamond's highest-profile deal was Barclays' controversial acquisition of the brokerage arm of US bank Lehman Brothers for 1.7 billion US dollars (£1.1 billion) after it collapsed in 2008.

In June 2010, Mr Diamond faced a federal court hearing in Manhattan, which was looking into allegations that Barclays duped Lehman Brothers out of billions of dollars during the deal.

Mr Diamond sits on the board of Old Vic Productions, alongside Dame Judi Dench, and is a trustee of the Mayor's Fund for London and a member of the British-American Business Council.

He still retains his links to the US, where he is chairman of the board of trustees at his old college and has also set up the Diamond Family Foundation which has given millions of dollars to education projects.